India to host World Employment Conference to market skilled workforce

NEW DELHI: The labour ministry wants to woo employers the world over to get them to hire India’s growing workforce, which the government estimates swells by 10 million every year.

The ministry and the Indian Staffing Federation, a body of the flexi staffing industry, are partnering to host the World Employment Conference for the first time in India. They seek to showcase the country’s talent beyond medical and engineering, the streams from where Indians traditionally migrate to developed nations and often don’t return. “The idea is to market our skilled workforce to the countries that have certain kind of skill deficit which Indian workers can fulfill,” a person associated with the event said.

Labour Secretary Shankar Agarwal said a conference of this scale would help understand the shortcomings in employment policies. “Going forward, we would make suitable corrections in our policies to enable employment creation for India’s large pool of unemployed and underemployed workforce,” he said.

Suchita Dutta, executive director of the Indian Staffing Federation, said India has more people than jobs available. This is “cost-effective” labour that can do the job overseas, offering a lucrative option for multinational companies and staffing firms to explore.

“The idea is to enable creation of a platform for employment outside India and other than Gulf countries, where lot of Indians continue to be employed as foreman and mechanics, by creating awareness and policies that would be mutually beneficial to employers and job seekers,” Dutta said.

At the conference, the federation would unveil a report that would rank nine Indian states on the basis of ease and success of flexi staffing across 15 sectors, based on the feedback from companies.